It would be doing injustice to Christian love, however, to suppose that it has nothing at all in common with intellectual admiration, and that its only spring of movement is pity. “Visiting the fatherless and widows in their affliction,” though in our present imperfect state the most characteristic, is not absolutely the most essential, feature in its exercise. If it were so, indeed, the Christian would never be comfortable except in the midst of misery; as a nurse can ply her vocation only at the bed of the sick or the wounded. But in fact his infinite tenderness for the lost sinner is produced and heightened by his experience of joy from communion with saints; and the contemplation and imitation of the image of moral perfection in the person of the great Captain of his salvation sustains him in his unwearied and often apparently hopeless endeavours to gather in recruits to serve under that so glorious captainship. We shall therefore justly say that without a Platonic love, that is, a fine spiritual passion for the character and person of Christ, the performance of the thousand and one works of social charity and mercy for which the Christian is so famous would be impossible. But we may say further, that the picture of Charity given in that wonderful chapter of St. Paul is very far from confining the sphere of Christian human-heartedness to that field of healing and of comforting in which so many charitable institutions in all Christian countries are the watch-towers. His picture evidently exhibits the ideal of a human being, not merely in the habit of lifting the fallen, healing the sick, and ministering, as the good Samaritan did, to those who may have fallen into the hand of robbers--these are extraordinary {226} occurrences, which will excite even the most sluggish to extraordinary demonstrations of human sympathy,--but the apostle of the Gentiles will have it that in our daily intercourse with our fellow-men we learn to live their lives sympathetically as intimately and as completely as we live our own; that we study on all occasions to identify ourselves with their position and feelings and interests, and then only pass a judgment on their conduct. “_Charity suffereth long, and is kind; charity envieth not; charity vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up, doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil; rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth; beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things_.” What a problem is here, what a lesson of humanity, of catholicity, and of something far more human than that mere toleration, which the nations of Christendom have taken now nearly two thousand years to learn, since the first preaching of the gospel, and are scarcely learning even now! How much of our daily judgments, spoken and printed, seems leavened in any degree by the genuine humanity and manifest justice of this divine